Why don’t I like hadoop? I state for the record that I only have a passing familiarity with hadoop from reviewing the docs and some modest amount of administration. My opinions are mostly uninformed.

Hadoop includes a distributed filesystem… written in java… This sends up a big red flag in my head. Filesystems are an OS level concern in my experience. Writing a distributed filesystem in java with no OS hooks seems on its face to start with an inefficient model. It’s also not a general purpose filesystem, so the usual unix (or windows) tools for dealing with filesystems can’t be used on HDFS. Many current super computers use the Lustre filesystem. Lustre has been around for more then a decade and is a very mature product. I’m not suggesting that Lustre is right for hadoop, but the list of claimed features for both is pretty similar. Since Lustre uses a POSIX filesystem interface, I can use all of my unix tools on it.

Job scheduling is another well traveled path that Hadoop developers decided to walk again. The hadoop developers have arguments against MPI and PVM schemes which are used in most Beowulf clusters. Maybe the arguments are valid, but I don’t see a reason why one couldn’t build on such a mature technology to produce an adequate scheduler. In fact people have built built such a scheduler.

On the other hand, HBase and the actual MapReduce components are novel. My main problem with hadoop is that they decided to build components which are readily available elsewhere, are probably more efficiently written, are certainly more mature, and integrate well into the OS. One of the advantages of open source projects is that one can borrow from other good projects. I think the interesting parts of hadoop would have advanced farther if they had used the well studied portions of beowulf clusters and other technologies as a base instead of building them.

• Wifi
• Suspend to memory
• Proprietary drivers for the Nvidia video card
• The media panel
• The nice volume control
• The CDRom/DVD. I assume the blueray portion doesn’t work.
• The USB, VGA, and HDMI ports.

Here are the problem areas that I’ve run into. I haven’t had time to sort them out. When I address the issues, I’ll probably write a new post.

• Sound works, but only from two of the five speakers.
• If you place two fingers on the track pad, the pointer flakes out.
• The wifi button is too close to the ctl key. I need to find a way to disable it.

There is plenty I haven’t tested too. Here are the unknown components:

• Finger print scanner. I’ve read that this won’t work with linux.
• Webcam. This is supposed to work fine.
• Firewire, eSATA, and “Display” ports. I’ve read that these work fine.
• SD card/Memory Stick slot.
• ExpressCard slot.

Overall, I am very pleased with this laptop. My wife did a great job picking it out and getting it for a good price (thank you honey). Since this was a fresh install, I decided to go for a new install of wine for all of those games that I like. Here is what I got running and what was required to get it running.

Wine 1.1.35 itself wouldn’t compile initially. This seems to be a known bug when compiling on 64 bit platforms. One solution is to remove the libmpg123 package. I preferred to keep the package, so I edited the file dlls/winemp3.acm/mpegl3.c. I changed line 642 from:

mpg123_feedseek(aad->mh, 0, SEEK_SET, NULL);

to:

mpg123_feedseek_64(aad->mh, 0, SEEK_SET, NULL);

Wine compiled fine after that.

Civilization required the installation of winetricks and the packages: msxml3 and d3dx9.

EVE just required adding allfonts with winetricks.

Runes of Magic runs without a hitch. Perfect World runs without a problem. Fallout 3 won’t even install. I will post when I figure out the problem there. I haven’t installed Oblivion, but I don’t expect any problems there.

Both of these little devices run linux. In the past I’ve used the compiler and perl, so I know they aren’t too dumbed down. They also can pass as small web servers. Wikipedia has a writeup on the zaurus in general. It also has links to various mostly out of date operating systems for it. Angstrom seems to be the most up to date distribution. The last package updates seem to be from late 2008. At the time of this writing, the angstrom link is broken, but it worked a couple of days ago. Hopefully, the outage is temporary.

I won’t go into a full review of the Zaurus. I can tell you why they are interesting for me. Here is the list.

• The zaurus has a functioning keyboard that even I can use with my huge gorilla hands.
• They have a CF slot, an SD slot, and the SL-C300 has a USB port for expansion. The CF slot can accommodate wifi and other peripheral cards.
• They run linux out of box, and there are several alternatives if you don’t like the built-in distribution.
• They are small and lightweight, even compared to my Sony Vaio UX280P.

I’m a little sad that Sharp has stopped making and supporting the Zaurus. If I had the time, I’d take on the project of updating one of the distributions. For now, I’ll just install something and see if I can find a good use for them. Here are some pictures.

This is the Zaurus SL-5500. The quarter next to it is for size reference. The bottom piece with the OK botton slides up to hide the keyboard.

The SL-C3000 is a “clam shell” style PDA. The one pictured has a compact flash Wifi card in the right side.

This is the SL-C3000 in “portrait mode. The Screen flips around and hides the keyboard.

What’s the moral of the story? Do the obvious thing first instead of last.

I use AWStats to give me statistics about what kind of readers I have. Amazingly, I do have readers and some of them are even regular readers. Here are some of the useless stats:

• The most alarming one is that readership has dropped off since I stopped writing about WoW.
• 59% of the readers use FireFox.
• 38% of you use Linux to browse this site, which explains a lot of the firefox usage.
• The most popular article is my pre-raid shaman gear guide, even though it’s probably a bit dated.
• The most popular EVE article is the one which describes installing EVE on Ubuntu. This article is 1/3rd as popular as the shaman gear guide.

My sister thinks I should write more often and include more images. I’ll attempt to keep up, and I’ll probably thumbnail some images if they add to the post. Since I don’t currently play WoW, I won’t be able to fix the content issue.

Recent and Future Changes:

I’ve done a small bit of optimization to the web server backend to this blog. Hopefully, the load times will decrease and my bandwidth usage will shrink.

I’m also considering moving to a summary of each post instead of the whole post on the front page. You would have to click through to the article if you are interested in its content. I may change the “skin” of the site. I want to keep it simple and fast to load, but I want to make it more visually appealing. I may ask my sister, “The Web Designer” for suggestions.

I’ve talked about adding advertisements before. I’ve been procrastinating because my perception is that there will be a lot of administrative overhead which I don’t have the time for. I’ll leave this as an open issue for now.

~$ sudo apt-get install gpsd gpsdrive

Turn on your gps unit and wait a few seconds (5 for the GPSlim 240). Run the following to discover the device:

~$ hcitool scan
Scanning …
00:0B:0D:6D:BC:5E    HOLUX GPSlim240

Save the address. It will be differentt then mine. Run the following command with your address and look for the channel number:

~$ sdptool browse 00:0B:0D:6D:BC:5E
Browsing 00:0B:0D:6D:BC:5E …
Service Name: SPP slave
Service Description: Bluetooth SPP V1.52
Service RecHandle: 0×10000
Service Class ID List:
“Serial Port” (0×1101)
Protocol Descriptor List:
“L2CAP” (0×0100)
“RFCOMM” (0×0003)
Channel: 1
Language Base Attr List:
code_ISO639: 0x656e
encoding:    0x6a
base_offset: 0×100

Append the following to /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf. Replace the device address with yours from the “hcitool scan” command above. Replace the channel with the yours from the spdtool command above.

rfcomm4 {
bind yes;
device 00:0B:0D:6D:BC:5E;
channel 1;
comment “GPS”;
}

Restart bluetooth. For some reason, I have to stop it, wait a few seconds and restart it. A standard restart may work for you.

~$ sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth stop
(wait a few seconds)
~$ sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth start

Reconfigure the gpsd package to use our new device. For my Holux device, I need to set gpsd to use read-only (the -b switch), otherwise the gps unit stops functioning.

~$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure gpsd
Start gpsd automatically on boot?
yes
Device the GPS receiver is attached to:
/dev/rfcomm4
Should gpsd handle attached USB GPS receivers automatically?
no
Options to gpsd:
-b

Run xgps to see if you can fix your location and see the satellite aquisition. Run gpsdrive for a map view. I leave actually using the data from the GPS as an exercise for the reader.

System:
Dell XPM M1710.
4GB RAM
Intel 3950 Wireless
Nvidia 7950 GTX 512 MB
New 5400 RPM 250GB Segate HD.

Go to the boot menu (F12 on Dell) and select CD-ROM boot.
Choose your language at the Ubuntu language picker. The second boot option is install. Pick
that. From here, you can probably pick the defaults and end up with a reasonable base
system. I chose to partition my hard drive using the advanced partition option.

My setup:
50GB root ( / ) partition
8GB swap
The rest for /home

After the first reboot, I only showed 3.3 GB of RAM with the generic 64 bit kernel. This was
surprising and a little disappointing. I tried to install and use the server kernel, but the
video drivers won’t work with that kernel, so I’m stuck with losing 700MB RAM. Wifi worked
out of box. I updated the system and attempted to enable the nvidia proprietary drivers.
They didn’t show up in the hardware drivers list until after a reboot, so….

Reboot ubuntu. Go to System/Administration/Hardware Drivers in the main menu. Select the
newest nvidia driver (it should be the “Recommended” driver) and click “Activate”. This wil
require another reboot. After the next reboot, you’ll want to set your resolution. It’s
best to do this as root so the configurator can save the X config file permanently, so run
this:
$ sudo nvidia-settings
Select X Server Display Configuration on the left. Set the resolution to the one desired and
click “Apply”. Click OK to accept the resolution. Then click “Save to X Configuration File”
to make the settings permanent.

Wine which comes with 9.04 is ancient (1.0.1). I compiled the latest as of
now (1.1.20). I had to patch the source to make the 3d models visible in EVE.
1) Spark up a terminal window and run:
$ sudo apt-get build-dep wine
to get the compiler and other stuff needed to compile wine.
2) Get the source from http://winehq.org in the right nav area of the site.
3) untar the source with:
$ tar xf wine-1.1.20.tar.bz2
4) $ cd wine-1.1.20
5) I need the patch from http://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=20412
save it where you untarred your source for wine and run this from the
wine-1.1.20 directory:
$ patch -p1 < ../apocrypha.shaders.1.1.19.patch
6) $ ./configure
7) $ make depend && make
8) $ make install
9) go do something else for a long while.
10)install cabextract:
$ sudo apt-get install cabextract

EFT installs and works out of box.
Ventrilo installs and works out of box.
EVEMon requires dotnet 2. Install that by using winetricks. Get winetricks from
http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks (save page as winetricks).
To run it, do this:
$ sh winetricks
Select core fonts (needed for EVE) and dotnet2. dotnet2 takes a long while to
download and install.

You can now use the offline installer to install EVE. You will lose all of your settings
from windows. I’m sure you can copy the settings folder from a windows partition, but I
didn’t test this.

If you run 2 clients, you’ll want to do some further setup. First, set the graphics in EVE
to windowed mode and at some lower resolution then your whole screen.
Make 2 icons for EVE. The Commands for each should look like this:
env WINEPREFIX=”/home/jjorgens/.wine” wine explorer /desktop=1,1600×1050 “C:\Program Files\CCP\EVE\eve.exe”
env WINEPREFIX=”/home/jjorgens/.wine” wine explorer /desktop=2,1600×1050 “C:\Program Files\CCP\EVE\eve.exe”
Adjust the resolution to be the same as you set in the game. Run one launcher for one account, and the other for the other account.

Strangely, if I run the game with the graphics at full tilt, the laptop will overheat and
shutdown after about 10 minutes of play. After turning the graphics all of the way down,
the game runs fine. I needed to use these low settings for when I am in fleet engagements
anyway, so it’s no loss for me.